A design brief for an industrial designer should define the problem, the user, the constraints, and how you will judge success — and deliberately stop short of prescribing the solution. That is the whole discipline in one sentence. The brief is the cheapest document in your project and the one with the most leverage: an afternoon spent writing it properly prevents weeks of concepts that look nice and solve the wrong problem. Below is what belongs in it, what should stay open, and how to use it once design starts.
Start with the problem, not the product
Open the brief with the situation your user is in today and why it is unsatisfactory. "Technicians carry three separate tools up a ladder and drop one about once a week" is a brief. "We want a sleek combined tool with a rubber grip" is a sketch you already made, and it caps the designer's contribution at executing your assumption. If you genuinely have a fixed concept — because of a patent, a platform decision, or existing tooling — say so explicitly and explain why, so the constraint is understood rather than guessed at.
What every brief must contain
The user and the use environment
Who holds this, in what conditions, wearing what, for how long? Kitchen counter, hospital ward, construction site, and gym bag imply completely different material, sealing, and cleanability decisions. Describe the environment in physical terms: temperature, moisture, dust, chemicals, drops, UV exposure, one-handed use, gloves.
Function and interaction
List what the product must do and what the user does to make it happen. Distinguish must-have from nice-to-have — every requirement you mark as mandatory removes design freedom, so mark honestly. This is also where any decision between physical buttons and a touchscreen should be flagged as open or already settled.
Hard constraints
Maximum dimensions and weight, the internals that must fit (battery, PCB, motor, display) with their real footprints, mounting and port locations, standards or certifications the product must meet, and target manufacturing process and volume. A designer who learns about your board size in week three will redo work you paid for.
Target cost and volume
State a per-unit manufacturing cost target and expected annual volume, even approximately. Cost target and volume together decide process, wall thickness, part count, and finish. Without them, the designer must guess, and guesses skew expensive.
Brand and visual direction
Reference images are worth more than adjectives. Collect ten products you admire and ten you dislike, and annotate why — "this seam looks cheap," "this matte finish hides fingerprints." Say where the product will be seen: retail shelf, e-commerce photo, or bolted inside a machine nobody photographs.
Deliverables and schedule
Name what you expect to receive and when: concept sketches, how many directions, CAD surfaces, a CMF specification, renderings, physical models. Ambiguity here is the most common source of billing disputes, and it also drives quotes — see what industrial design costs for how scope maps to price.
How success will be judged
Write down the criteria you will actually use in the review meeting. "Operable with one gloved hand," "reads as medical-grade, not consumer," "fits in a standard tool bag." Criteria written before you see concepts protect you from deciding by whoever spoke last.
What to leave open on purpose
Resist specifying form language, materials, part-splitting strategy, or mechanism. Those are the answers you are paying for. A brief that dictates "aluminum shell with a hidden hinge" may have just ruled out a cheaper, tougher solution the designer would have found. Leave open anything where you would accept a better idea, and mark it clearly as open rather than silently omitting it.
Ground the brief in real users
The strongest briefs quote users. Ten conversations with people who have the problem will surface constraints you would never invent at a desk — and they cost nothing. Our guide to DIY market research on no budget shows how to run those conversations, and validating a product idea covers what to do with what you hear. If you already have a rough model, put it in front of users before writing the brief; findings from user testing with a prototype turn vague preferences into specific requirements.
Treat the brief as the start of a conversation
Expect a good designer to push back on parts of it. Questions like "is that dimension a real constraint or a preference?" are the brief doing its job. Update the document as answers land, keep it version-controlled, and use it as the reference in every review. Related engineering requirements often deserve a separate, more formal document — see how to write a product requirements document — with the design brief staying short and readable.
One page done well beats twenty pages of wishlist. If you are unsure whether you even need a designer yet, our guide on when to hire an industrial designer covers the timing question.
Want help shaping the brief?
Projects House writes and reviews design briefs as part of product development, and often the fastest way to sharpen one is a single conversation about what the product has to do. Send us your draft or your idea through the contact form and we will tell you what is missing before it costs you a design round.